FATTENING WALL STREET — Mike Whitney reports on the rapid metamorphosis of new Fed Chair Janet Yallin into a lackey for the bankers, bond traders and brokers. The New Religious Wars Over the Environment: Joyce Nelson charts the looming confrontation between the Catholic Church and fundamentalists over climate change, extinction and GMOs; A People’s History of Mexican Constitutions: Andrew Smolski on the 200 year-long struggle of Mexico’s peasants, indigenous people and workers to secure legal rights and liberties; Spying on Black Writers: Ron Jacobs uncovers the FBI’s 50 year-long obsession with black poets, novelists and essayists; O Elephant! JoAnn Wypijewski on the grim history of circus elephants; PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on birds and climate change; Chris Floyd on the US as nuclear bully; Seth Sandronsky on Van Jones’s blind spot; Lee Ballinger on musicians and the State Department; and Kim Nicolini on the films of JC Chandor.

It happens all the time. If the antiwar movement takes on the Democrats for their bitter shortcomings a few liberals are bound to criticize us for not hounding Bush instead. It doesn’t even have to be an election year to get the progressives fired up. They j...

Leonida Zurita Vargas, a Bolivian coca farmer organizer and alternate Senator, was planning to be in the US right now as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights. This tour would take her to Vermont, Harvard, Stanford and Wa...

It is time for the American people to send a wake-up call to the domestic auto industry (General Motors, Ford Motor Company and DaimlerChrysler). Backlogged engineering advances well suited for commercial application and widespread diffusion are ready for use. Unf...

Later today we will have a cloture vote on S. 2271. We should not end debate on this bill, and we should not pass this bill. Doing so will only help implement the deeply flawed deal that was struck with the White House to reauthorize the Patriot Act without enacti...

Holding a banner that read, "GOD FORGIVE AMERICA," seven peace activists were arrested yesterday in front of the White House, in a civil disobedience protest against the war in Iraq. Arrested by U.S. Park Police were Brian Terrell, Ed Bloomer, ...

Those who worry that the world’s Arab and Muslim populations pose a threat to free speech in Western democracies need not fear. The first Amendment remains intact-particularly, it seems, when it comes to the "right" to inflict racial slurs. Indeed,...

Evidently the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world’s leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first ...

Three articles this weekend suggest that President Bush and his aim-challenged vice president are being abandoned by key elements of their base, and are facing a growing threat of impeachment. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dexter Filkins, one of...

America is headed for a soft dictatorship by the end of Bush’s second term. Whether any American has civil rights will be decided by the discretionary power of federal officials. The public in general will tolerate the soft dictatorship as its discretionary ...

Attention Homeland Security: The Taliban may have sleeper cells in South Dakota! What else could explain our neighboring state’s fanatical move to ban abortion in virtually all circumstances? The mullahs in South Dakota don’t want women to have ...

In December 2001, Fox TV broadcast a four part investigation on Israeli espionage by Carl Cameron, which the Israeli embassy in Washington, JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), and AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) immediately ...

In 1956 Canada provided India with a 40 megawatt "Canadian-Indian Reactor, U.S." (CIRUS) research reactor near Mumbai. The United States supplied the heavy water necessary to control nuclear fission. In 1959 Canada sold a 125-megawatt nuclear reactor to ...

Mysterious bombers blow up an important Shia shrine in Samarra. Government death squads murder members of the armed opposition. A wave of fury is unleashed against Sunni mosques, killing dozens. Moqtada al-Sadr orders his Mehdi Army to protect the Sunni mosques in...

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations’ outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed. John Pace, who left Bagh...

There is nothing inherently wrong with rewriting history. All of history is the story of who lost, rewritten by who won. The whole thing is arranged to suit the guy at the top with the fancy hat and the massed armies at his beck and holler. Well and good. ThatR...

London. Ken Livingstone was suspended on full salary as London mayor for a month yesterday for likening a Jewish newspaper reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Once again, some basic human elementary liberties are sacrificed in defence of Jewish dig...

A few days from now, Bush will go to India and reaffirm his newfound love, becoming the only Republican President to visit India after Nixon. Bush and his ‘mouthpieces’ are quite vocal about their need of India – to compete with the EU, to check ...

Supply-Side economics was dubbed "Reaganomics" by the media. If you were for Reagan, that meant you were for it. If you were against Reagan, you were against it. That’s as far as public understanding ever went. Even today three decades later...

Lahore, Pakistan. Major cities in Pakistan have been in flames, several individuals have died, and damage to property is estimated to be in millions of dollars. These are among the worst riots in Pakistan’s history. Unrest of any significant ma...

"I feel invaded," said Philip A. Denney, MD, at the start of the week. "I feel violated and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it." An anonymous concerned citizen had sent him documents revealing that two of the patients he examine...

President Bush has approved a deal selling control of six major U.S. Ports to an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, for $6.8bn. DP World, a state-owned business based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), bought out London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigati...

"Levitan the painter and I went out to the woodcock mating are yesterday evening. He fired at a woodcock and the bird, wounded in the wing, fell in a puddle. I picked it up. It had a long beak, large black eyes, and magnificent plumage. It looked...

Can anyone doubt that the war in Iraq has proved to be Osama bin Laden’s sweetest dream come true? In his book on the run up to war, Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar at the White House, immediately recognized this potential risk of an Iraq invasion...

Three years ago, the world witnessed something unprecedented. On the same day, in 900 cities in forty countries north and south, east and west, thirty million people took to the streets in protest against the imminent attack on Iraq. There were demonstrations in M...

Yet again, as we stare uncomprehending into the abysmal state of world affairs, we ask "Why must we now learn about Dubai?" We are told by the Bush Administration that this deal was checked out thoroughly and that it would be wrong to discredit an...

The proposal that the United States turn over management of its East Coast and Gulf seaports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates has thus far been handled as a call for demagogy, not for proposals to enhance a substantive innovation of far-reaching prom...

A few years back, when I was teaching at an American university in one of the more remote corners of the Midwest, David Horowitz came to give one of his usual talks to the campus Republicans castigating university faculties for their ‘liberal’ bias. A ...

and MADIS SENNER In 2005, Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born American citizen, was convicted in Syracuse, New York of 59 felony charges. In addition to charges of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, Medicare fraud, and mishandling charity money, D...

A U.S. military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would be used to repackage the occupation of Iraq as part of Washington’s "long war" on "radical Islam," give Israel a blank check to crush the Palestinians and justify further U.S. imp...

The White House turned over last week 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office senior aides had sent in the spring of 2003 related to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed du...

So I’m back from another sensational Sex Week at Yale, about which I will commit bloggamy shortly. In the meantime, I just have to bloggamize a bit on the monumental, murderous "offense" being taken by both the Right and the Left, the Mob and the E...

Mastermind a war justified with lies that causes the deaths of at least 100,000 Iraqis, and the corporate media shut up and repeat the Pentagon line. Injure a millionaire Republican with a shotgun blast to the face while hunting with the rich and powerful, and the...

The past few weeks have amply demonstrated why the Democratic Party is headed for history’s scrap heap. At a time when the vast majority of Americans have concluded that the president is a lying incompetent and, most likely, something of a nutcase a...

The riots in Pakistan are hardly news anymore: if they appear in the paper at all, it is on page C17, between a story on starvation in the Sudan and a report that Mrs. McGillicuty fell down the stairs. The riots continue nonetheless, seemingly unconcerned that the...

The standard line about Iraq right now is that the country is on the verge of civil war. That "simmering hatreds" are boiling to the surface. That "sectarianism" is to blame. All those regurgitated clichés of the Orientalist canon may we...

Oxford, England. For those who haven’t noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It has been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on the complicity of its pow...

Bush’s efforts to allow a United Arab Emirates firm to run U.S. ports serves two larger purposes. First of all, it helps his friends. Two members of Bush’s administration have dealings with both the companies that recently merged into DP World, the Ara...

The Bush Administration’s championing of a disastrous war, its grievous neglect of homeland security in New Orleans, and its promotion of a Dubai company to manage key strategic ports all point in one direction. The Bush White House represents a fifth column...

Japan is marching back to military power, or more precisely, "is being marched" by the United States toward a new militarism, as its neo-nationalist prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who like many hawks has never served in the military, acts as eager dri...

R. had a work meeting in Ramallah. She planned to return home, to East Jerusalem, with M., her partner, who works in Ramallah. They reached the Hizma checkpoint, east of the Pisgat Ze’ev settlement, where there is a permanent Israel Defense Forces post that ...

The Democrats are getting ready for the upcoming election season. Having done so poorly for the past, well, decade or so — they may finally be seeing an opportunity to capitalize on one of the Bush administration’s many misfortunes. Whether it’s ...

The new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) mandates that "future warriors will be as proficient in irregular operations, including counterinsurgency and stabilization operations, as they are today in high-intensity combat." Thus the Pentagon appears to be ...

Death is always in the news. From local car crashes to catastrophes in faraway places, deadly events are grist for the media mill. The coverage is ongoing — and almost always superficial. It may be unfair to blame journalists for failing to meet stand...

Canada’s national paper The Globe & Mail was caught last week with its hand in the unethical journalism jar. On February 15, 2006 the Globe and Mail published an editorial titled "See Hamas for What It Is" in which it argued that those who take...

So the Bush White House, with Tom Tancredo oddly in tow, wants to sell public land throughout the west to help rural schools, primarily schools in California, Oregon, and Washington. It seems these schools got used to a token payment from timber sales on public la...

As we approach the fifth anniversary of September 11, when the US mainland was attacked by an act of terrorism and suffered the loss of nearly 3,000 innocent lives, the tens of millions of European and American citizens of Middle Eastern ancestry have been devasta...